Editor’s note: Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor and currently counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy, a nonpartisan organization engaged in preserving the rule of law. Jeffrey Abramson is a professor of government and law emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “We, The Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy.” The views expressed here are the authors’ own. Read more opinion on CNN.
On Monday, US District Judge Tanya Chutkan set a March 4 start date for former President Donald Trump’s federal criminal trial on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. “The public has a right to a prompt and efficient resolution of this matter,” Chutkan said.
She is correct. There are also many other reasons why the date she chose is the right one, and why Trump’s proposal to set his trial for April 2026 was preposterous.
Most obviously, with Trump as the current leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Americans deserve to know before they vote in the general election if a jury of his peers finds him innocent or guilty of having tried to end the lawful transition of power after the 2020 election.
As a Politico Magazine/Ipsos poll reported Friday, 3 in 5 Americans favor a trial of Trump on the charges in the case before Chutkan ahead of the 2024 election. A post-election start date, as Trump wanted, would drain a jury verdict of its crucial value as citizens cast their ballots on who shall lead the country.
In addition, the March 4 date leaves room, if exigencies arise, for moving the start date back a couple of months and still finishing before the GOP’s July nominating convention. Indeed, a date later than March 4 would have posed the serious risk of the trial eventually being moved into the heat of the summer and fall election campaign.
Having a trial at the peak of the presidential race would allow Trump to scream even louder about being a victim of a justice system trying to interfere with his campaign. Of course, we’ll hear that anyway, but the earlier the trial, the less force that message will have since ample time for campaigning would remain after the trial.
What American democracy cannot afford, and what Chutkan would not allow, was for Trump to run out the clock to try to win the election in the absence of a conviction. Such a scenario would allow him to order his administration’s attorney general to dismiss the case, as well as the other federal case that special counsel Jack Smith is bringing over his alleged misuse of classified documents.
Trump has asserted his innocence in all four criminal cases against him.
There’s another reason why March 4, the day before the Super Tuesday primary contests, works well: It sits in the middle of two other scheduled 2024 trials.
On January 29, an important civil fraud trial is set to begin against Trump by investors accusing him and his company of promoting a pyramid scheme. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.
And March 25 is the date scheduled for jury selection in the Manhattan trial related to “hush money” payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has signaled that he would accept a delay in that start date if needed to accommodate the federal trial in the election interference case.
Last among the reasons supporting the March 4 date is that seven months between the date of the indictment and start of a trial protects Trump’s right to have adequate time for his lawyers to prepare.
Trump’s attorneys attempted to justify a two-year delay on the grounds that they needed that much time to review the volumes of documents in the case. The claim was frivolous. Any experienced judge or litigator knows that modern digitalized search methodology makes locating and reviewing the central written evidence in a case easily doable in a period of months.
Trump’s lawyers also argued that their timeline was consistent with the average time for conspiracy cases generally to go to trial as well as the January 6 prosecutions of participants. Smith rebutted their statistics by showing that they had skewed the timelines by including periods where Covid-19 had delayed trials, periods of extended plea negotiations and periods after trial until sentencing, which can be many months.
For his part, Smith had aggressively sought a January 2 trial date. But Chutkan rejected that date, adding two months to ensure sufficient prep time for Trump and his lawyers.
Now that it looks like Trump’s attempt at an extended delay is failing, we can expect him and his allies to unleash another strategy: disdaining jury verdicts — 2024’s equivalent of dismissing the 2020 election results as “rigged” even before they occurred.
History tells us that we, and our system of justice, need to stand up for both the integrity and timing of Trump’s jury trials.
Regrettably, some Trump supporters’ disrespect of jury verdicts is already happening. We saw Trump’s acolytes fall into line last week on the Republican primary debate stage in Milwaukee. Six of eight Republican presidential candidates chose to “trash the trial by jury,” as a Washington Post opinion headline put it, by raising their hands to say that a jury’s guilty verdict would not change their support for Trump if he were the party’s presidential nominee.
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Dismissing the jury system undermines an extraordinary inheritance that was hard-won over centuries. Thomas Jefferson, months before the signing of the US Constitution, wrote how the jury system embodies democracy in America:“(T)he opinion of 12 honest jurymen gives still a better hope of right.”
Trial by jury, secured in Article III of the Constitution and the Sixth Amendment, ensures that judgments of innocence and guilt are tied to the conscience of the community.
Every citizen who hopes to keep our constitutional republic should applaud a judge and judicial system that aims to avoid delaying justice until it is denied and to preserve our ability to vote with the information we need. To accomplish that double purpose, Chutkan chose exactly the right start date for Trump’s most pivotal federal trial.
